Lou Lumenick

While “300" maestro Snyder puts together some very striking scenes — which may be enough for many fanboys — they never really cohere into a whole. He literally throws in the kitchen sink in a film that frantically introduces characters and concepts while never clearly establishing the rules of the DC Comics universe.

In the end, this relentlessly nihilistic crime-caper thriller adds up to less than the sum of its impressive parts.

Hard-core Hitchcock fans will not find much in the way of revelations.

Good grief! This painfully sincere animated feature seems aimed less at contemporary kids than nostalgic adults who might buy toys marketed for what is being billed as the 50th anniversary of the Peanuts gang for their children and grandchildren.

For all of its in-your-face, full-frontal sex scenes and threesomes (one involving a transsexual), this autobiographical story is almost sweet.

A slapdash, sporadically funny cross between the infamous “Ishtar’’ and the mercifully forgotten “American Dreamz.’’

It’s a disappointment as a movie, though Shannon is especially fine in a rare sympathetic role.

Perhaps this year’s timeliest film — as well as, unfortunately, one of the hardest to sit through.

A Walk in the Woods is broad as a barn door, with two stars who have minimal chemistry — and there’s not much in the way of reflection about mortality.

“Risky Business” it’s not, and Delevingne is no Rebecca De Mornay.

The film never adds up to the sum of its parts, effectively a two-hour trailer for a movie I’d still be interested in seeing.

The pleasant but forgettable Adult Beginners strains a bit too hard for a happy ending, and tends to lay on the schmaltz and metaphors (like the swim class that gives the film its title) with a trowel.

Coming down too hard on this load of schmaltz — as I said when reviewing my first Sparks adaptation back in 2002 — feels like taking a baseball bat to a sack full of newborn kittens.

Even the great Helen Mirren can do only so much to elevate this relentlessly mediocre, fact-inspired drama.

Certainly watchable, but don’t go expecting much in the way of surprises.

An instant candidate for the so-bad-it’s-sort-of-great hall of fame, Jupiter Ascending is totally bonkers, a sort of black-velvet-Elvis mash-up of “Star Wars’’ and every other sci-fi/fantasy movie of the past half-century right up to “The Hunger Games.”

Despite excellent performances by Kevin Costner, Octavia Spencer and other cast members, Mike Binder’s racially tinged custody battle drama Black or White never achieves much in the way of dramatic credibility.

A glossy, empty and ultimately unsatisfying — if undeniably entertaining — movie.

Nowhere near as funny as you’d expect with its stellar cast.

Certainly nails the era, right down to a lengthy pan across a none-too-appealing dinner buffet.

If you were wondering what “12 Years a Slave” might have been like as a two-part episode of “Masterpiece Theatre,” you might want to check out this unsatisfying but not uninteresting oddity. It renders another historical story about race with exquisite taste but not much in the way of passion.

A fine cast headed by the underrated Greg Kinnear lifts this year’s third major religious movie, the fact-inspired Heaven Is for Real, somewhat beyond its Hallmark Channel-caliber script and visuals.

Deeply mediocre and ultra-predictable.

Divergent is a clumsy, humorless and shamelessly derivative sci-fi thriller set in a generically dystopian future.

The best parts of this awkwardly paced film are Bell’s scenes with Enrico Colantoni, who returns as her private investigator dad, concerned she’s throwing away a bright future by getting sucked back into her old life.

Unfortunately, as in Bay’s “Pearl Harbor,’’ much of the sometimes draggy 2 1/4 hours is given to clichéd inspirational drama.

A campy guilty pleasure that serves up a “Gladiator’’ knockoff as an appetizer to the impressively flame-filled main course.

Except for a couple of isolated, mildly subversive moments, Hanks is basically playing the genial host of “The Wonderful World of Disney’’ rather than an actual person.

Out of the Furnace is much longer on style and belligerence than actual substance.

A family-friendly, Hallmark Channel-ready musical dramatic fable whose plot more closely resembles Spike Lee’s “Red Hook Summer.’’

The film at least achieves the level of mediocrity thanks to the professionalism of two slightly younger participants — Kline and Mary Steenburgen, who also have Oscars on their mantels but go well beyond phoning it in here.

Danny Huston looks and sounds like his celebrated father, John, more and more each year, so I enjoyed watching him play a flamboyant and womanizing legendary director not unlike his old man in Bernard Rose’s modest little comedy.

Gorgeous location filming on Italy’s Amalfi Coast and a voice-only performance by the great Claire Bloom as an elderly woman remembering World War II are the main attractions in Kat Coiro’s familiarly snoozy romantic drama.

A campy erotic thriller that’s seriously short of, well, passion.

A credulity-straining thriller featuring a few good paranoid moments — and, perhaps most important, Rebecca Hall running in high heels.

The superficial script doesn’t go nearly deep enough to begin explaining Lovelace.

I’m a sucker for films with great surfing footage, let alone wacky ’70s hairstyles. But this overlong, cliché-infested Aussie period drama tested my patience.

Superficial and hokey yet still oddly endearing.

A couple of heavyweight actors — Tim Roth and Cillian Murphy — get top billing, but this British drama belongs to young Eloise Laurence, memorable as Skunk, the diabetic daughter of Roth’s kindly solicitor.

Less an awful movie than a totally uninspired one. The under-5 set may find it funny, though I suspect their parents will be checking their watches a lot, as I did.

Silly enough for you? Did I mention that the immortal Ken Jeong of “The Hangover’’ plays God, who gets mighty pissed when hubby accidentally shoots Jesus out of the sky?

After a wickedly promising start, this pointed political satire quickly deteriorates into a fairly routine, if sporadically quite effective, home-invasion thriller.

While Greenwood and Posey turn on enough charm to make this a fairly painless experience, Zack Bernbaum’s And Now a Word From Our Sponsor is a mild, toothless satire — a “Being There’’ where there’s barely any there there.

The overall effect tends to be as chilly and monotonous as Shannon’s demeanor as Kuklinski — a real disappointment.

Gandolfini acquits himself well in a rare big-screen lead as the depressed operator of a rinky-dink amusement park in the waning days of winter.

The disappointing The Company You Keep consistently stretches credulity way past the breaking point in its depiction of journalism, police procedure and political activism.

The hippie heroine of this wacky Aussie comedy cheerfully theorizes that Australia was actually originally settled not by convicts but by mental patients — which may possibly explain the antics of Russell Crowe and Nicole Kidman, among others.

Although the golden-hued cinematography (a filming cliché that really needs to be retired) and the sometimes slack direction by Marc Evans are minuses, Hunky Dory does deliver in the musical department.

If I Were You has more than its share of laughs, but director Joan Carr-Wiggin needed to cut half an hour to make this fly without interest flagging. She had the exact same problem with her last movie, “A Previous Engagement.’’

“Let’s show ’em some good old-fashioned American swagger,’’ MacArthur says on his arrival in Tokyo. It’s too bad director Webber and the screenwriters, David Klass and Vera Blasi, didn’t take his advice to heart instead of largely wasting Jones and some very nice period details.

Todd Robinson’s Phantom gives us a couple of things we haven’t seen in a while: the great Ed Harris and a Cold War submarine thriller. It’s not something you want to plunk down $12 for, but just diverting enough to check out when it arrives on Netflix Instant.

A glorified TV movie.

Odd and not entirely uninteresting little docudrama.

Dan Schechter's no-budget comedy about the romantic and professional travails of a pair of financially struggling film editors offers a few laughs, all served up on eyeball-gougingly ugly digital video.

Parker is watchable chiefly for Statham, who exudes effortless cool and excels in hand-to-hand combat, as well as demonstrating his skill at wielding some very unlikely weapons.

To put it as positively as possible, there's never a dull moment in this flick - and that's not something you can take for granted at this time of the year. At the same time, though, there's rarely a believable moment in the script.

A cartoonish 1940s shoot-'em-up that's impossible to take seriously.

The tin-earned dialogue and haphazard plotting are more reminiscent of Tarantino's frequent collaborator Robert Rodriguez.

The acting is OK, but none of the leads has the kind of sizzle that might have turned this into something as special as another film set roughly in the same era, "Diner.''

Nuanced work by the great John Slattery ("Mad Men") as an emotionally distant dad isn't enough to sustain more than sporadic interest in Brian Savelson's underwritten, slow-moving indie, which plays distressingly like a photographed off-Broadway drama.

The extra money has bought a professional crew for scripted sequences, in which Jonathan and his mother too often mug for the camera.

Ultimately fails to make its case that five teenagers were sent to jail for a crime they didn't commit solely because of institutional racism.

The surfing sequences are some of the best I've ever seen in a film, and the re-creation of Jay's climactic battle to ride El Nino-driven waves is real white-knuckle stuff...But neither Curtis Hanson ("L.A. Confidential") nor the fellow veteran director who replaced him when Hanson took ill, Michael Apted ("Gorillas in the Mist"), can do much with the hokey sequences on land.

The posthumous campaign to polish Michael Jackson's tarnished reputation continues apace with this Spike Lee infomercial, commissioned by Sony and the money-grubbing Jackson estate to promote the 25th anniversary of his 1987 album "Bad.''

The sort of enigmatic movie that many critics embrace because it's open to endless interpretation.

The Manzanar Fishing Club has enough interesting footage for perhaps a 15-minute segment of a TV news magazine. Beyond that, my eyes started to glaze over with endless talk about rods, reels and bait.

Good acting and some very good scenes don't quite add up to a good film.

Unremarkable and none-too-scary horror movie.

Burt Reynolds and Sally Field they're not, but you could do worse for mindless late-summer entertainment than Dax Shepard and Kristen Bell in Hit & Run.

If Ruby were more of a person than a character, we might care more for her plight. But like Calvin, Kazan has written herself into a corner that can only lead to embracing the sappy romantic clichés that Ruby Sparks tries half-heartedly to mock.

Even in an underwritten role, the delightful Madsen shines in her best performance since her comeback role in "Sideways."

Sometimes dull and mostly uninspired, it's much less a satisfying reboot like "Batman Begins'' than a pointless rehash in the mode of "Superman Returns.''

Slight and unremarkable.

While recollections of the participants in the rescue are often riveting, the subject of Jonathan Gruber and Ari Daniel Pinchot's film remains elusively out of grasp.

Black loses control of Virginia as it lurches from political satire to unintended black comedy to mom-and-son melodrama. But the performances and the movie's sheer crazy audacity make it watchable.

Rebecca Hall is wasted as Sandvig's sister and the film's voice of reason.

Even for a surreal black comedy, Jesus Henry Christ requires massive suspension of disbelief.

Holds your attention for a while, but fails to build much suspense as it races toward a predictable climax. It probably would have worked better as a series of Webisodes, which reportedly was the original plan.

While it's not a disaster like Kasdan's last film, "Dreamcatcher'' (2003), Darling Companion doesn't amount to much more than a fairly painless way for the AARP set to spend an hour and a half watching a movie with stars their own age.

There isn't a surprising moment, and it's an affirmation for hard-core fans and pretty much everyone else of William Shatner's immortal exhortation to Trekkies: "Get a life!"

Harmless if not exactly inspired, and rarely hilarious.

Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's Intruders looks great and has a promising opening, but this atmospheric Spanish psychological thriller is otherwise pretty underwhelming.

Return comes briefly to life when John Slattery of "Mad Men'' turns up as an acerbic yet sympathetic reclusive drunk whom Kelli meets during court-mandated rehab. But it's not enough for a film that limps along to a pretty much preordained climax.

With cheesy-looking effects including a ride on the backs of giant bees and dubious literary references, Journey 2: The Mysterious Island comes dangerously close to giving books, never mind 3-D, a bad name.

Erstwhile boy wizard Daniel Radcliffe works no magic as a grieving lawyer in The Woman in Black, a creaky haunted-house story that's strong on creepy atmosphere but woefully deficient in the scare department.

O'Grady is very good, but she can't make the hard-to-watch Rid of Me dramatically credible.

Johnny English Reborn sounds like a reboot, but it's actually a tired recycling of something that wasn't exactly fresh to begin with.

Make no mistake, Father of Invention is the hilarious Spacey's show all the way.

Basically "csi: East Texas,'' the debut feature of Ami Canaan Mann is long on style and short on coherent storytelling, not unlike numerous efforts by her director dad, Michael, who serves as a producer here.

Yet despite the efforts of an excellent cast headed by three top comedy names -- Owen Wilson, Steve Martin and Jack Black -- and tons of beautiful scenery (mostly British Columbia and the Canadian Yukon), this movie stubbornly refuses to take flight, or generate more than a few chuckles.

Based on a memoir by Nigel Slater, a British celebrity chef who makes a cameo appearance, Toast also charts the budding chef's growing interest in hunky, scantily clad guys. Be warned: Some of the regional British accents would benefit from subtitles.

Seven Days in Utopia obviously isn't targeted at us cynical New Yorkers. But it goes down more smoothly than you'd imagine thanks to Duvall and an excellent supporting cast.

The overlong Amigo has its heart in the right place, but its approach to complex issues is too simplistic to win over unconverted minds.

I might be able to get past that if Hathaway and Sturgess had any chemistry. There are no sparks whatsoever, and that's always a deal-breaker for me in romantic films.

Rambling, mildly engaging micro-budgeted indie.

Sporadically hilarious but more often just plain crass and contrived.

Even with a clever final twist straight out of "The Twilight Zone," this crummy-looking two-hander is a tough sit.

Alas, the complications don't arrive nearly quickly enough for the overlong and slow-paced Lucky to really cook.